Addressing anthropology and physiology from the late Enlightenment to about 1850 in France, this book will contribute to the history of both disciplines and that of physical medicine, from which both in large part derived. The author considers a new approach toward what was sometimes simplistically translated from the French as "the science of the man" and analyzes the slightly different French concept of "la science de l'homme," as articulated in Montpellier and Paris during the French Revolution, within a new historiography aided by the insights of Foucault's discourse analysis.
This study attempts not only to show the discursive power of the science of man at successive moments of French history, but also to explore the dynamics of its history. It examines how the science of man acquired widespread support and then, having exercised dominance, how it collapsed into a substratum of principles and impulses no longer joined under a single discursive rubric.
The medical science of man cannot be precisely defined. As Nietzsche said of the concept of punishment, its history is its definition, and that history is the subject of this book. But the science of man can be said to have had four main modes of reference: First, it was holistic. Second, it postulated intimate relations among separate domains of human experience that, in the Eighteenth century, were usually conceived according to a tripartite scheme of the physical, the mental, and the emotional, but that, later, were to be reduced to what physicians of the revolutionary era called "the physical and the moral." Third, the science of man pushed medicine into society, by its own internal logic as much as by any overt ideological or political intention, for it was a medical philosophy that regarded intellectual, emotional, and social phenomenon as intimately linked to the well-being of the body. Last, the science of man eliminated the problem of discerning human "types" amid the great variety of clinical and social details gathered in the course of medical investigations. This book is not about all of early "anthropology" or the early "science of man"; rather, it is about the anthropology of doctors. 1 To Montpellier doctors, physiology was the study of living organisms as opposed to "dead objects" or "brute matter," and its central objective was to discover the unique "laws" governing the existence of organisms endowed with "life." As adapted by Paris 2 doctors in the context of the Revolution, Montpellier's vitalist physiology retained its focus on the human and indeed was conceived of as the fundamental framework for the larger science of man that was to claim authority in diverse regions of human life and experience. The science of man was to investigate not body, mind, and/or feeling in isolation but, instead, the "relations between the physical and the moral." Grounded in physiology, it promised to derive from the study of human "organization" fundamental principles for a science of human beings as individuals in society.
Throughout the eighteenth century, physicians referred to their approach to medicine as "philosophical" merely as a way of saying that it was rigorous, genuinely scientific, and informed by sound method. Medicine was "philosophical" if it stood in contrast, on the one hand, to "routine" and blind obedience to tradition and, on the other, to hucksterism and superstition. All of this changed after the Revolution, as the phrase "philosophical medicine"